Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 1092 of 1104
A $533 million factory in Texas was built to make 155mm artillery shells for Ukraine. It produced nothing because the machinery is defective.
By Jesse Coburn | August 12, 2026
https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artillery-factory-
failed
Extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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5% of US Patriot stocks gets Ukraine through winter, 10% ends the ballistic threat — and Zelenskyy has just 1%, he tells CNN
By Maria Tril
13/08/2026
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/08/13/sell-us-10-of-your-patriots-and
-well-destroy-every-russian-ballistic-missile-zelenskyy-tells-cnn/
Ukraine holds only about a tenth of the Patriot interceptor missiles it needs from the United States to stop Russia's surging ballistic strikes, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN. Selling Kyiv 5% of the current US stockpile would carry the country through winter, he said, and 10% would let it "destroy all the Russians' ballistic missiles" — but he holds 1%.
The plea puts a number on a shortage that has run through Ukraine's diplomacy all summer and left its cities increasingly exposed. It is the concrete cost of near-empty interceptor stocks: on 5 August, Russia fired 28 ballistic and anti-ship missiles at Kyiv and Ukraine intercepted none of them, killing 17 people, and four days earlier launched 27 ballistic missiles with only one stopped. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, according to the UN.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ukraine’s new ballistic missile puts Putin within reach
Kyiv is developing its own domestic ballistics as Russia’s missile threat grows.
By Veronika Melkozerova | August 12, 2026 1:24 pm CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-fire-point-ballistic-missile-r
ussia-war/
KYIV — Ukrainian defense tech company Fire Point's first ballistic missile will be ready this fall, its CEO told POLITICO — a crucial development if Kyiv hopes to survive the growing ferocity of Russian missile attacks.
Iryna Terekh, who is also Fire Point's chief technology officer, said it is working on its tactical short-range FP-7 ballistic missile. With a 200-kilometer range and carrying a 150-kilogram warhead, the missile can hit ground targets and is also being reworked to be used in air defense systems.
Fire Point is also developing the FP-9 ballistic missile, carrying an 800-kilogram warhead with a range of up to 855 kilometers, putting Moscow well within range.
Both programs are crucial to Ukraine. Kyiv faces a growing shortage of Patriot interceptors, and the Pentagon is now scrambling to rebuild its own supplies. Ukraine also wants its own long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia, especially ballistic missile launchers. The lack of interceptors is allowing large numbers of Russian missiles to hit their targets, and Moscow's attack capabilities are now being boosted by its North Korean allies.
“Our FP-7 is already in a certification process. That requires a certain number of battle-testing launches performed under a special procedure,” Terekh said this week. “We’re going to do those launches, prove its effectiveness in real combat against our enemy, and after that it will be ready for contracting."
She added that if all goes well, "it is completely realistic to get it ready by this fall.”
Fire Point's timeline was backed up by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, although he said deploying the FP-7 will require significant international cooperation. "As for mass application, I cannot say, because there are things that do not depend on Ukraine... there are some elements from other countries."
The FP-7 is a key part of Europe’s first common anti-ballistic system, called Freyja. Fire Point will provide the missiles and launchers, while Ukraine's allies will work on components and surveillance and tracking radars.
“I can’t share the details because it’s a matter for the partners whether they want to talk about it. But everything is going quite quickly. All the partners work in the rhythm of Ukrainian defense companies,” said Terekh.
She also underlined the complexity of shifting from a simple ground-to-ground missile to adapting the FP-7 to missile defense systems.
“Their aerodynamic form and production principles are similar, but their functions are different. One has to fly from point A to B and hit the target; another one has a more sophisticated assignment to find and intercept the target,” she said.
The future Freyja interceptor will be produced in two iterations. The first will be similar to the PAC-2s used by Patriots, which explode next to their targets; the other has the more complex task of finding and intercepting a missile, something done by Patriot's PAC-3 interceptors.
“It is way faster to produce a PAC-2-like missile,” said Terekh, adding: “We don’t have the luxury of spending decades to invent our own hit-to-kill [interceptors], so we decided to go in iterations ... and in the future, we will learn how to make our own hit-to-kill similar to the PAC-3.”
Building Ukraine's own missiles
While working to develop its own capabilities, Ukraine is also pushing to get a licensing agreement from the U.S. to make its own PAC-3s. U.S. President Donald Trump told Zelenskyy last month that such a deal would be possible, but he has since walked that back and is now pressing for the Pentagon to rebuild its own stocks after reports that the U.S. burned through huge numbers of missiles in the first days of the war against
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Ukraine’s new Tu-95 killer is a $48,000 copy of a drone China refused to sell
Ukraine went to China to buy the drone. China refused. Two years later, the MICH 2000 costs $2,000 less than the original—and just took out a Russian bomber.
By David Axe
13/08/2026
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/08/13/mich-2000/
• Ukraine's state security service has its own special attack drone
• The MICH 2000 is a highly evolved copy of a Chinese drone China refused to sell
• There are at least eight versions of the 2,000-km drone, from $48,000
Whittling down the bomber fleet
Ukrainian drones are slowly chipping away at the Tu-95 fleet. A 2022 drone raid badly damaged one of the lumbering turboprop bombers at Engels-2, potentially leaving no more than 51 intact Tu-95s in the Russian air force inventory at the time. Smuggling tiny explosive drones across Russia in trucks on 1 June, 2025, the SBU hit at least seven more Tu-95s as well as four Tu-22Ms, among other aircraft.
Trending Now
The 16 July raid is the more recent Ukrainian effort to shrink the Russian bomber force, but it surely won't be the last. The Russians' roughly 120 bombers—Tu-95s, Tu-22Ms and Tupolev Tu-160s—launch the cruise missiles that routinely blast Ukrainian cities and power plants.
Struggling to intercept all Russian deep strike munitions in the target zone, in part owing to a deepening shortage of the best air defense missiles, Ukrainian forces increasingly aim to prevent the Russian munitions from even launching—by smashing munitions factories or, yes, destroying irreplaceable bombers. Of the three Russian bomber types, just one—the Tu-160—is still in production, albeit at a rate of barely just one every year or two.
Expect more MICH 2000 raids. The type's anonymous builder churns out 6,000 MICH 2000s a year but aims to boost output to 10,000 a year. And the firm customizes the drones to suit particular missions.
According to Oboronka, there are eight main versions. "Fighters can choose what kind of communication they need: analog, digital or Starlink. They can choose the warhead, the size of the fuel tank, the possibility of additional guidance." The navigation system can be made more jam-proof by adding additional jam-resistant controlled reception pattern antennas.
Drone strikes by MICH 2000s and other drone types aren't the only ways Ukrainian forces are trying to blunt Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and power plants. Ukrainian drone teams are also trying to take out the last five warships in the battered Russian Black Sea Fleet that can fire Kalibr cruise missiles.
On 11 August, drones struck at least three of the ships in the port of Novorossiysk in southern Russia. The frigates Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov and the corvette Bykov all suffered visible damage.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ukraine Is Done With the NATO Fairy Tale
By David Averre | Aug 12, 2026 at 05:50 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-nato-fairy-tale-zaluzhnyi-future-west
ern-security-12308372
In 2024, NATO members gathered to declare that, after two years of bitter war with Russia, Ukraine was on an irreversible path to NATO membership.
The statement still takes pride of place on the NATO website, but today the promise rings hollow. When alliance members descended on Ankara last month for the bloc’s summit, there were sweeping declarations of support and pledges of funding, yet not a word was uttered about when Kyiv could expect to be welcomed into the club.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky cannot kick up a fuss about this. His words are scrutinized endlessly by his allies, his adversaries, and most of all his own people. The former commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhnyi, is under no such pressure to mince his words.
"I know NATO very well. For 12 years, I personally worked to ensure that we met NATO standards, and every year I listened to tales that we were about to join NATO. Unfortunately, we never will," Zaluzhnyi, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, reportedly told fellow diplomats in Kyiv earlier this month.
This was met with jubilation in the Russian media, where the former general's words were paraded as a "belated epiphany" and evidence that the "corrupt Kyiv regime" had "betrayed its people."
Yet Zaluzhnyi, who successfully repelled Russia’s 2022 assault on Kyiv and spearheaded Ukraine’s rapid adoption of battlefield tech innovation to combat its larger adversary, is not capitulating to the Kremlin’s perspective; he is proposing a new approach to Western security—one in which Ukraine plays a leading role.
It Was All a Dream
Ukraine has been waiting a long time to be welcomed into the transatlantic security club. Eighteen years, to be precise.
It was at their summit in Bucharest in April 2008—an event attended by Vladimir Putin—that NATO allies first stood together and declared Ukraine and Georgia would one day be accepted into the alliance.
Russia went on to annex Crimea from Ukraine, armed separatists in the nation’s eastern Donbas region and then launched a full-scale invasion designed to conquer Kyiv. It was only in July 2024, at the alliance’s 75th anniversary celebrations in Washington, that the bloc finally confirmed it would continue to support Ukraine’s journey down the "irreversible path" to NATO membership.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as he addresses the media during a press conference on the third day of the NATO Summit conference in Bucharest, Friday April 4 2008.
...
Then America reset the game board. In February 2025, newly minted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States did not consider NATO membership a "realistic outcome."
Last month’s NATO summit in Ankara seemingly confirmed Ukraine’s NATO bid as a pipe dream: the declaration called Kyiv a contributor to transatlantic security and pledged €70 billion (over $80 billion) in military equipment and assistance—but the word membership was not mentioned once.
Formally, the door remains open, but Ukraine may never reach it. Zaluzhnyi, for one, says Ukraine must recognize this and seize the initiative to determine its own future.
Although he later stressed his enduring support for NATO and said Ukraine should still become a member, the former commander in chief offered a damning assessment of the security bloc as a hangover from the mid-20th century, arguing Ukraine’s innovation of battlefield tactics has surpassed NATO's outdated thinking.
"It is impossible to join an organization that possesses the doctrines of World War II with the level of development that exists in the Armed Forces of Ukraine," he said at a meeting of ambassadors in Kyiv on August 3, according to a report by European Pravda. "Most likely, NATO will remain in the same form as it is, and will spend 12 years, like
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
THGR, did it ever occur to you to look for actual FACTS on the ground to either validate or refute the blah blah blah that that you fill your head with?
More blah for ya comrade.
T
F-35 slated to be a major element in U.S. Air Defense architecture !
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During a briefing on August 12, 2026, acting Defense Minister Major General Yevhen Khmara confirmed that Ukrainian forces are rapidly expanding their long-range strikes. The strategy aims to force Moscow into a just peace by relentlessly crippling its supply networks.
By Daniel Wolfram | August 13, 2026 3:29
https://www.dagens.com/war/ukraine-vows-russia-will-burn-in-bold-new-s
trategy-to-cripple-moscow-and-end-the-war
. . . Escalating the war
Senior military officials recently met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to map out the next phase of these deep-territory strikes.
Khmara made the military’s intentions clear after the planning session. “Today, at a meeting chaired by the President, further joint steps were determined. Ukrainian operations will become increasingly complex to counter. Ukrainian weapons will only become more mass-produced. Strikes will be more precise. Russia will burn,” he said.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy and his advisors are beginning to outline a new, broader strategy. Ukraine and its international partners have established a joint action plan aimed at forcing Vladimir Putin to end the invasion.
Zelenskyy argued that ordinary Russian citizens must feel the consequences of the conflict on their own soil. Only then, he noted, will public pressure build against the Kremlin. As Moscow prepares for a crucial and grueling winter, Kyiv is urging Western allies to supply more air defense systems without delay.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ukraine’s Deep-Strike Strategy
Deep Trouble
By Evan Spear, James P. Sutton, Daniel Sipes, & Ross Anderson | July 13, 2026
From The Dispatch.com newsletter
https://tinyurl.com/4tt3mc97
Russia’s Syzran Oil Refinery, located more than 500 miles from the front lines of the war with Ukraine, usually processes between 7 and 8.5 million tons of crude oil each year.
Over the weekend, waves of Ukrainian drones pummeled it for the third time since January, a bombardment that some intelligence analysts believed knocked out both the plant’s primary crude-distillation units.
On July 6, Ukraine sent long-range drones roughly 1,800 miles to strike the Omsk oil refinery—Russia’s largest, and its top gasoline producer—and attacked a primary crude-processing unit, setting a fire that halted the plant’s operations entirely. And on July 8, Ukrainian drones struck the Stavropol oil depot and the Krasnaya Zvezda oil depot, both located more than 300 miles from the war’s front lines. The campaign has also spread to Russian shipping. Over the weekend, Ukrainian drones hit a Russian oil tanker in the Don-Azov Canal, part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” that transports sanctioned oil.
The deep strikes on Russian energy infrastructure come as part of a 40-day influence operation, approved by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in June, to force Russia to the negotiating table. Zelensky is matching the military pressure with a political shake-up, announcing Sunday that Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko will step down as he pivots toward a more aggressive strategy. And although Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected calls to negotiate—Kremlin insiders say Putin is more likely to escalate the war than end it—the Ukrainians have done immense damage.
Ukrainian drones have successfully struck all 11 of Russia’s largest oil refineries (the Angarsk petrochemical plant in Siberia is the only major facility still untouched), and Russia’s diesel production fell by 1 million metric tons in April 2026 and then another 600,000 metric tons in May. Between July 6 and 12, Ukraine hit 90 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov, forcing Russia to suspend shipping operations in the connecting Kerch Strait, which it relied on to ship oil, grain, and steel to international markets and to feed its forces in Crimea. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s siege on its former territory has forced Russian authorities to declare a state of emergency.
Ukraine’s increased use of long strikes to hit energy targets deep behind Russian lines is partly the result of Zelensky’s decision to appoint former digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov, known as the architect of the country’s “Army of Drones,” to lead the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense; and, in recent months, U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon have provided Ukraine with information on these targets.
But the shift also comes from the lessons learned after the failed 2023 counteroffensive. The Ukrainian high command had attempted to break entrenched Russian positions through massed frontal assaults with armor and infantry—and when that largely failed, the military leaders changed focus, instead attempting to collapse the army from behind.
Russia has layered air defenses along its front lines and around the areas it values most—Moscow and St. Petersburg chief among them—but given Russia’s size, it has been unable to cover the front line and a rear that spans 11 time zones at once. Interceptor shortages are forcing commanders to strip batteries from one region to reinforce another, leading to porous air defenses, which Russia’s vocal military bloggers have loudly criticized.
Ukraine has also changed the way it uses drones, emphasizing scale. It has started copying Russia’s own saturation tactic—sending enough drones at once to swamp any single Russian Pantsir air defense system, which can engage no more than four targets simultaneously.
“Russia’s air defense systems are not as poor as I think people make out,” Emily Ferris, a senior associate fellow in the International Security research group at the
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Two Years On From Kursk Offensive, Now Ukraine Has Real Leverage
By David Averre | Aug 13, 2026 at 05:01 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/zelensky-ukraine-leverage-trump-russia-novoro
ssiysk-12317123
Two years ago almost to the day, a cohort of Ukrainian soldiers launched a daring mission: to give Vladimir Putin a taste of his own medicine and seize some Russian territory.
They piled into tanks and armored vehicles, broke out of Sumy and surged across the border into Russia’s Kursk region, and quickly locked down more than 500 square miles of enemy soil.
It was widely billed as a stunning offensive, one that saw Russia’s borders breached for the first time since World War II, and gave Kyiv a valuable bargaining chip as rumors swirled that ceasefire talks might gather pace.
Fast forward a few months to February 2025, and Russia’s forces had practically erased all Ukrainian troops from Kursk, save for a thin wedge of territory, and a weary Volodymyr Zelensky headed to meet newly minted President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. We all remember how that meeting turned out.
Now, with U.S. negotiators expected to visit both Russia and Ukraine in the coming weeks, Zelensky has submitted a fresh peace proposal to Washington.
This time, his leverage is real, and although the prospect of a ceasefire with Russia materializing in the near future is vanishingly small, the Ukrainian president has a much better chance of focusing the Trump administration’s ire on Moscow to heap pressure on his opposite number in the Kremlin.
You Don’t Need Land To Have a Good Hand
The Kursk offensive was supposed to change the equation for Ukraine.
In January 2025, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken openly acknowledged that Kyiv’s foothold across the border would play an important role in any ceasefire negotiations as the Biden administration prepared to hand over the keys to the White House to Team Trump.
Instead, what started as an operation to secure vital leverage, while distracting Russian forces from pressure points on the front line and giving a middle finger to Moscow in the process, ended in a grisly defeat.
...
Ukrainian forces were eventually forced back out of Kursk, with soldiers and civilians alike later condemning the operation as "illogical" and "not worth the cost."
But Kyiv learned the lesson, and with the exception of a small cross-border operation into Belgorod, Ukraine’s armed forces have not attempted to set foot on Russian soil since.
They have, however, developed a new bargaining chip that does not have to be occupied, supplied or defended. Thanks to its extraordinary innovations in drone technology and increasing numbers of homegrown missiles, Ukraine’s forces can strike deep into Russian territory.
Since the start of the year, Kyiv has steadily ramped up the quantity and ambition of its strike campaigns to destroy oil refineries, energy and logistics infrastructure; it launched three times as many long-range attacks in July as it did in January, according to data gathered by independent conflict monitor ACLED. Last week, a drone attack hit a warehouse used by Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries in Yekaterinburg, more than 1,200 miles from the Ukrainian border.
Then came Novorossiysk. In a major overnight operation Wednesday, yet more Ukrainian drones and anti-ship missiles struck grain export terminals and Russian warships at the port city that, until this week, had been the only place Russian vessels in the Black Sea could shelter from Ukrainian fire.
Moscow claimed its defenses shot down more than 500 Ukrainian drones, yet still enough got through to cause significant damage. The numbers illustrate Kyiv’s emerging strategy: it does not necessarily need to defeat Russian air defenses so much as overwhelm and stretch them, according to an analysis by Emily Ferris, senior associate fellow for international security at the RUSI think tank.
Territory can change hands and be retaken, but the capability and will to destroy valuable targets deep
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